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Sally. When we think of the classics of Islamic thought today,

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we think of the first instance of works written by the founders of the very schools of theology, law, philosophy,

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linguistics, Sufism and historiography,

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and by subsequent scholars who shaped these fields through their seminal contributions out of the bookshops around us.

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Her eyebrows for hours with my visits to Cairo could be relied on to contain such works.

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But this landscape of relative established classics was not what al-Hassani faced at the turn of the 20th century.

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Far from ubiquitous, these works were scarce and difficult, if not impossible to find.

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Not only had most not yet been edited and printed, but there were few manuscript copies of them,

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and the whereabouts of those few that existed were often unknown.

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Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.

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These are some of the books written by our members, members of our community, Orba and books that our community are talking about.

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My name is as someone other than me and I teach contemporary Islamic studies at the Middle East centre.

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My guest today is Ahmed Shamsi. He is an associate professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago.

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Ahmed is no stranger to the UK.

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He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at So US and the LSC respectively, before heading west to pursue a doctorate at Harvard.

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Since 2010, Ahmed has been based at the University of Chicago. His research is concerned with intellectual history of Islam,

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focussing on the evolution of the class of the classical Islamic disciplines and the scholarly culture within their broader historical context.

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His research addresses themes such as a reality, literacy, the history of the book,

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and the theory and practise of Islamic law, and its important first book, The Canonisation of Islamic Law.

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A Social and Intellectual History,

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traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries.

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AM its second book. The subject of today's conversation is similarly a significant contribution to our understanding of Islamic intellectual history.

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It is entitled Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.

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Welcome to Book Talk. Thank you for having me. It's our pleasure.

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And so just to start this conversation off, I wanted wondered if you could tell us something about how you wrote your book.

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When did it start? What sources were you able to uncover and what countries did the research take you to?

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So part of my formation as a scholar is that I,

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I like to browse bookshops in the Middle East and spend hours there just looking at the various sections and reading these books.

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And for me, they represented something off of a tradition that you could just access and buy and take home with you.

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And then when I started to think about doing serious research,

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I was confronted with the with the fact that that not all books I was interested in were printed.

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And some of them had survived, but they were in manuscript form.

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And that was the first time when I started to think, well, isn't that strange that some books are printed in, some books are not printed.

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And and then getting I mean,

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I became fascinated with the world of manuscripts and manuscript libraries and the kind of the the books that I found

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there were different from the books I was used to like in kind of bookshops and on libraries that I printed material.

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So there were in terms of numbers, the kind of classical works were much fewer than the more recent works and.

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Right. So I did. I saw that these were not the same type of things.

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They didn't have the same type of books. And in fact,

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some of the books that I had read them that were familiar to me from from all kind of every kind of bookshop I've been to in the Middle East.

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I just couldn't find any copies. There was maybe one copy somewhere.

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And so that idea of how strange is it that that seems that there's only one manuscript surviving and now we have these copies everywhere.

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And everybody seems to be like, oh, yes, everybody talks about love. So, you know, about even husbands talking Hammamet, but only one manuscript.

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And that happens to be in Holland. Like what? That's a strange story.

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And so over time, I mean, I did you know, as you mentioned, my first book was in the 9th century.

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And I, I, I started to get the strange feeling that that, you know, I was trying to both access printed material and manuscripts,

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but I felt that that much of our perception had been shaped by people who had

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edited works and that rather than just seeing directly into the ninth century,

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we were seeing the ninth century through some sort of filter that we weren't really familiar or that we weren't aware of.

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And while some of these books were edited by by Western Orientalist, I mean, especially in the field of Islamic law.

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That depends from from field to field sometimes, but especially for Islamic law, as basically all editors in the Middle East.

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And really, I didn't know any of them. And so I started to think about them and read about them and kind of pay attention to them.

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And so that's. So it wasn't interested. That kind of grew while I was a grad student.

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And then I started really sitting down and writing in 2014.

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But I had already collected quite a bit of material, you know, in libraries.

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I did research in Egypt and Syria and Turkey, in various European libraries and and in American libraries.

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And I tried to kind of yeah, you do have these sort of interesting you open with this beautiful anecdote of, you know,

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finding this manuscript of and you kind of mis translate the title in manuscript as well because you think the mother,

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you know, of Shefi or something along those lines.

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And it's of course, Jeffy's, um, I can't remember Shaffi wasn't mentioned in the original title, and that's why I think he made the mistake.

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But it's clear that you said I think at the end of that story that I knew that I would one day write this book.

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So this has been in your mind since your doctorate days, basically. And it's really wonderful test of I.

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I love the way in which you weaved that sort of personal anecdote and the personal story into something which is actually quite the point

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that you've just made in terms of our academic perception of the field of Islamic studies as a field is shaped by this unconscious bias.

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These are sort of fashionable term right now that I think you've done a wonderful job sort of informing us about.

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And I look forward to going into that conversation in greater detail as we as we proceed.

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If it's okay. I'm going to sort of go ahead and pick a point from your first chapter where you discuss the way in which the

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voracious appetite of European scholars for manuscripts from the Middle East in recent centuries innocent.

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Almost unwittingly contributed to the decline of Middle Eastern libraries,

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and you kind of signal sometimes that practises were quite unscrupulous as well.

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So this was a fascinating dimension for me.

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A centuries long tradition of orientalism in a pre-set, saidon sense that seems to have been, you know, previously largely unknown.

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I wonder if you want to comment on this sort of briefly.

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I mean, on the one hand, there is, you know, in recent years that there have been studies done on museums and the collections of museums and,

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you know, countless jokes about the British Museum and what it contains and where it's from, etc.

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But. But for manuscripts that I feel that there's still a lot to be done.

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In fact, it's almost there's been almost nothing that I could draw on about the idea of where do these things come from.

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And when you look at actual accounts by Orientalists who travelled the Middle East in the 19th century, particularly about even 20th century,

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that they removed manuscripts from endowed libraries where they knew that there were there were not these were right endowed libraries,

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whether these managements were not for sale. And they sometimes did it, you know, by outright theft, sometimes by bribery, very often.

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They there were also laws in effect that you were not allowed to export these manuscripts.

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There was an also another layer of kind of of illegality involved in the procurement of these of these manuscripts.

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But on the other, you also signal to forgive me,

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also signal that sometimes the sort of the the institutional weakness of these endowments lent themselves to those who are.

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But the supposed caretakers were in such penury themselves that they would,

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in a sense, resort to selling manuscripts in order to eke out an existence as well.

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Sure. In that sense, it was it was a kind of a perfect storm that you have a period in which you have,

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on the one hand, this explosion of European curiosity.

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And it's important to keep in mind that it was a different career curiosity than you would have today.

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I mean, at that point, you know, an early 19th century, people were still looking for the wisdom from the east.

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I mean, they were looking for information about astronomy or the sciences, whatever, to discover new stuff, cutting edge stuff.

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But, you know, you you had the institutions of of of Islamic book, book culture, libraries,

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et cetera, that that work that were built on a system of endowments and and particular.

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I mean, I know my book is primarily about the Arab Middle East. Right.

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These endowments were in in bad shape at this at this at this time period.

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These Arab countries were provinces of of kind of non Arab empires.

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And while the endowed libraries in Istanbul, for example, or whether or maybe it is Farhan or in Delhi or something, we're in a better state.

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The ones in the Arab Middle East were in a much worse state.

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And so you had on the what you had these these libraries in Europe that that were that were funded very well, that had very wealthy donors,

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that had well, you know, what were the states themselves when investing heavily in individuals that they had money?

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And then you had these institutions where, you know, the endowment that had been found at 200,

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300 years earlier, the librarians wages hadn't had kept up with inflation.

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There were still two years ago from three years ago from the white Korea.

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And that that led to two to kind of rampant kind of selling out of manuscripts.

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And it was part of the kind of formation of modern states,

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modern nation states in the in the mid of mid 19th century that you have these new libraries founded.

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David Cuttable embassy in Cairo, the Viada a library, and in Damascus, where they said, well, look, we have to kind of break this endowment,

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endowed libraries and put them together and have them centrally stored and have

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librarians that are paid by by the government to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.

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Right. That's that's a fascinating key aspect of this,

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which I hadn't thought about quite so much in the sense that this is a the modern state is actually, in a sense,

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been instrumental now in presenting these sort of manuscript libraries in recent decades, perhaps, and for over a century or so and certain countries.

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And yes, I mean, that's that's a transformation, which is also, in some respects,

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a sort of ideological shift away from the endowment to the modern state, so to speak.

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Which is which is a fascinating way to think about this.

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But your comment about sort of, in a sense, the Arab world becoming a provincial region within a larger empire with the with the Ottoman,

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whether the multiple empires is interesting because it leads onto another question that I had seen,

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which was about the way in which in various parts of the what you allude to scholars from other parts of the Islamic world.

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You mentioned Mauritania, Iraq in the case and whatever else OBD.

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I believe he had Iraqi heritage, but he's actually born in India as well. So the great polymath of the 18th century.

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And while most of your work does focus on Egypt and central Islamic lands of Egypt,

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to a certain extent with people like John Kasmi and others, Syria as well, or Shahn,

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I wonder to what extent you think that the observations that you make about sort of persse classical

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book culture and I'm using a term that you use here can be extended beyond the Egyptian context.

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If we were to think about some of these other sort of areas. Yeah.

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So I think it's important that, you know,

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my faith the majority of my book focuses on Egypt as a stage at which print begins in the Arab world and in which it is,

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you know, it reaches the highest volume interplay.

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So it wetware wet begins as a part, part and parcel of the kind of modernising state venture of Mohammed Ali.

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But also, there has a a liberal kind of press law, which makes it the place where people just come and print books.

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And so it's it's a stage for people from from everywhere.

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I mean, that's that's East Africans from from Zanzibar who print stuff in Egypt and round people from Somalia and people from,

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of course, Syria, Iraq and North Africa. I mean, there's European Orientalists print stuff in Cairo.

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That's India. Right. And so on and so on. So it's it's not it's not like some sort of nationalist Egyptian history, of course.

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And you make it clear to Egypt as as a stage. Yet.

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But for the kind of preprint culture, I, I wanted to.

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I mean, there are certain universal aspects of this. You know, what would I called post classical scholarship.

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And really the reason why I call it post classical, I think it's apt to call it post classical.

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Is that the classical material just isn't particularly interested anymore.

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Interesting anymore. For most scoring it kind of right. It's not a you know, the way that I mean that that kind of work.

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You speak of how Ashie, for example. Yeah. There's this culture of, you know,

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secondary commentaries and tertiary commentaries and even quaternary commentary since it were so that Scholastic's I mean,

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I call this phenomenon scholasticism, which obviously analogy to to to European in mediaeval history.

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Right. A history of of of commentary's, a history, that kind of intellectual worldview in which more or less everything that is known is known.

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Right. Things can be explained, can be analysed in new ways and in interesting ways, formulated in interesting new ways.

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But kind of we would kind of know the boundaries of what is no known, no knowledge knowable.

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And we we have a limited kind of clusters of texts and commentaries on those texts that we consider.

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Right. Right. And. And for that.

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And so there's a certain traditionalism in it that that, you know,

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we kind of we consider that that certain what's bequeathed to us is what really matters.

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And also that that we don't really venture out and look for books that might have been forgotten or that

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might find out of a tradition that like that there must be a reason why it fell out of the tradition.

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Right. You give this fascinating sort of anecdote. I think it's useful.

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Another who says something along the lines of you shouldn't publish it in 10 years works because they've been, you know, discarded for a reason.

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The tradition has recognised that they don't really deserve. I mean, I think it was in the band.

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Yes. Yes, that's correct. And then, of course, al-Alusi retorts and say, you know.

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Right. If you take that logic, Shaffer's work is almost gone.

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But all this kind of lewd poetry and whatever, you have hundreds of copies.

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So that's really what that's what we should should read and study.

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There's a certain kind of a problem with with tradition and that that comes up and that becomes exacerbated through print that you start questioning,

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you know, mathematics of cultures have a specific logic wet.

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Each copy has to be copied by hand. And so.

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So you like the works that have lots of copies.

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That has a certain kind of that has a certain.

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That shows something. It shows that these words are used. That they're stargaze.

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That you ask people to study. They've been accepted. You know, this is very often a kind of phrase that's used, you know.

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This is this is accepted or this is, you know, looking at Kabul, you know, sometimes they say that sort of thing.

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Yes. And then but then the question of of what if what if the tradition.

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I mean, what if the if tradition itself isn't a thing with its own mind.

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You know what? There are books that are really valuable, but I've just been forgotten for whatever reason that might be useful to read and write.

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And part of this commentary culture is also that there's this lovely, lovely anecdote that that really brought it home for me.

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Have seen in his autobiography a life where they get taught, they get taught poetry.

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And his his brother, his friends, they run off to the bookshop to look for commentaries like poetry.

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And he said, that's not how I look like he's the blind kid sitting there.

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Like, that's not how you read poetry. I mean, you read the poetry and that kind of idea that there's a there's a fear of I might misunderstand,

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like, what is the correct understanding of this tack. Right.

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Like, I don't have any like a framework, a tradition that explains it, Raymie, that there's a fear of kind of deviance that comes in.

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If you take texts that are these these often texts. Right.

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And which are not transmitted, you know, with with snow and things like this.

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But kind of that that specific context of of of modernity, of challenges off of Western political domination,

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but also this the knowledge and the power that comes with it, that it attracts people to kind of kind of discovering things in their own tradition.

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They don't actually fall out of the tradition that that's that was for me.

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I mean, if I had to say what the contribution the main contribution of our book is,

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is that I feel that a lot of modern scholars of modern Islamic thought or modern Islamic history,

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for them there is kind of modern stuff,

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I don't know people translating Voltaire into Arabic and whatever and doing whatever the modern stuff is or that old stuff.

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But to think that there is amongst this old stuff,

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there's actually there's actually a way of of discovering really old classical works that was a revolutionary modernising strategy.

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Right. Right. And that we don't see anymore today because we've taken them to be not normal and natural.

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Oh, I'm sure everybody must have known all these classics, which in fact, is not the case,

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that there was for me that the grand really the great grand discovery that in a sense, the epiphany of the book.

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Yes. I mean. And that funny as well. I mean, in a sense, it just suddenly changes the way you see it, the entire tradition.

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Although, I mean,

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maybe I can sort of mention another very encyclopaedic scholar of our own time is the Mauritanian scholar Mohammed Alhassan with the other.

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And he I remember listening to a lecture of his once where he basically described the tradition.

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I can't remember the exact Arabic word he used to describe it, but he basically says, you know, something along the lines of.

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Animal. I won't let allow anyone to tell us and allow us.

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And the knowledge that people need is sometimes sort of concealed and then revealed just by the vicissitudes of history.

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He suggested, for example, that he must know the book even misled,

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which is this enormous, you know, considered to be the largest, must never be compiled.

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Basically, it's completely disappeared or, you know, perhaps there are certain citations here and there.

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And then in later centuries, perhaps someone rediscovers a just or a, you know, a selection of readings of a hadith or.

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And that can actually provide a kind of you know, from his perspective,

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working within the Islamic tradition, in a sense, provide means of accessing knowledge that was once lost.

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But that is now needed in this time. And in a sense, it's God unveiling something not in it and not in a cursory sense.

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Leave it. And so, you know, there is that kind of sense, even amongst a scholar, you know,

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working within the tradition of that contingency of what we have access to, which, you know, you don't you don't hear it very often.

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But I think it's great to sort of put that front and centre in it in a book like yours.

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I think it's very helpful in many respects. Yeah, I did.

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I didn't want to. To kind of give the impression that there was like 300 years in which nobody thought about classical works.

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Right. But but I mean, even I you know, I made the experience myself to lock lockdown now that if the library isn't accessible anymore,

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there's just there's just practical things that you just can't go and just take all the stuff down.

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And I work with it and. Right. And if you have even just practical decline off of availability of work.

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Right. It has an effect on what your scholarship is. What what your what your scholarship includes.

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Right. You know, if if your own scholarship doesn't include these works and the next generation,

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as the next nation always does, is like, what do I need to learn? What do I need to know to be educated?

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All right. You know, I need to know those specific commentaries. I don't need to know all the old stuff, you know.

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That's right. Right, right. Right. You know, maybe there's a few opinions by Tabari that we need to memorise or that we need.

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Right. Fourth hand. Right. We don't we need to read that whole thing anyway.

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Doesn't exist probably anymore. I mean, somebody like Mortada Zebedee who was who was travelling all over the place.

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Right. And who clearly had enormous memory and was able to too.

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I don't know. I mean, some people have that ability to write, kind of take all these pieces of information, put them together.

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But it's it's very tiring to do. I mean, even today, you know, doing my research, sometimes I hadn't a problem that, you know,

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you are in the Middle East and you have you're looking at manuscripts, but you don't have a good secondary library.

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And then you go back to your Western institution that has a good scholarly library.

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It doesn't have the mountains, you guys on only trips. That is difficult. Today, you can and have so much digital digital access.

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But but to think about the things, the premodern period.

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I mean, even if there have been I mean, even for those who who had an interest, it was it became real difficult.

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I mean, I think in in so many respects, this idea of, you know, Estie and so to speak,

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like having that capriciousness that I think is like, what does A, B, the oil payment Karani, some of these sort of PostgreSQL figures,

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but who in essence, you sort of suggest exemplify this encyclopaedic learning or an attempt to maintain that sort of standard,

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even through a culture which in a sense doesn't quite value that anymore?

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You know, I think I think that's illustrative.

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And I think you you do signal this, including a remark in your conclusion that a little in a moment that the time isn't a uniform time.

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It's not sort of like, yes,

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there are certain themes that you consider to be present as deserving the label of scholasticism and post classical book culture.

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But there are these kind of fascinating figures.

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And in a sense, your homing in on some of these fascinating figures, particularly the latest stage when they are the people who honour these texts.

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I wanted to sort of talk a little bit about, you know,

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this this point that you make between this kind of you could say almost an Orientalist

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narrative in the pejorative sense of decline vs. the attempt by a lot of scholars,

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you know, of our generation. And, you know, I think the previous generation now who are basically trying to push back against those sorts of problems.

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And so, you know, in your conclusion,

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you actually are very careful to highlight that there's a kind of unfortunate but largely superficial alignment of your narrative

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with the so-called intellectual decline narrative against which many of these scholars have been pushing for some time now.

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And, you know, I thought that your conclusion quite sort of carefully balanced the desire

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between trying to avoid reinforcing the transcendent triumphalism to the kind

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of Eurocentric scholarship while recognising that there were indigenous voices of reform that existed that recognised serious deficiencies in what,

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you know, you've called classical culture. And I wonder I mean, this is a question that I grapple with just an extent.

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How do you balance this sort of desire in this literature?

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Or how do you strike the right balance between trying to correct for issues of Eurocentrism,

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which I think you are quite conscious of throughout your work, but also correcting for the overcorrection, so to speak.

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So how how what would you say to someone like myself?

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I mean, on the one hand, I think it's it's always helpful to be really precise and that that the enemy of I mean,

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that the antidote to stereotypes and generalisations shouldn't be just the opposite, the generalisation of stereotype, but it should be precision.

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And so, you know, if if you take a word like decline.

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Right. That can you know that that. There are things that that you can quantify and where there is a decline.

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I mean, like that the the the number of books in libraries in Cairo over the number of

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working madrassas in Cairo declined from the 16th century to the 19th century.

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I mean, it's just numbers. You can just see a number, lower number.

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And similarly, you can look at American whatever American economic dominance are not in 1945 and today.

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And you can see a decline. Clearly, there is a decline of it produced 50 percent of all goods in the world and 45.

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Right. Today it does. I don't know how many. Seven percent. That's right.

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But but the I think the problem of the narrative of decline is that nothing happened.

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Nothing worth thinking about or nothing of any kind of happened that I think

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that we don't we don't use that for the United States or for Great Britain,

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which declined. Right. Right. But but we use it for kind of post classical Middle East.

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Right. Which it's like it's not like that. There were just, you know, smoking opium pipes lying on a couch.

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Right. Right. So. So it does not you know, you can't take a look.

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Yeah. To kind of re-establishes. Oh, well, we don't have to. We don't have to talk about that period.

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Right. Right. But at the same time there is that there are there's a kind of knee jerk generalisation of saying,

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oh look, no, here I give you a list of books that were written in this time period.

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So it was a it was flourishing.

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If you're not looking at what the books are about or if you say, oh, look, they will look at they were studying these rational sciences.

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Look here. There's all these citations.

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Mark Masters of the rational sciences without saying, OK, what were is it interesting that in this time period,

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esoteric sciences were were categorised as rational sciences.

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So animal Hotovely was considered to be a rational science. I mean, that's just an important kind of thing to put out there.

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But then there's another that there's a slightly different but also kind of current way of thinking about it,

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which is saying things like the state is bad, more kind of iron, cage of rationality is bad.

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But the Middle East didn't have that. So it becomes like the opposite of the West.

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But in the positive, in a positive way. So they didn't actually they they didn't have whatever they had all these ecstatic ways of knowing.

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So look how how this is solving the problems of the current West.

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And so I think, you know, for me, it's it's important to to understand history is not in a kind of melodramatic sense of it's either.

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It was good of it's bad. Right. Right. But actually, what was at stake, you know, what did it mean to to be an intellect, you know,

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to be an educated person in the 17th century as compared to the 10th century as compared to the 20th century.

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And we accept this in European intellectual history in the early 20th century, you know,

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like physics on the atom level or quantum physics like that was the thing where all these young geniuses flock flock to.

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And then in the later parts, you have DNA.

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Is that becomes biology or, you know, not computer science or something like the rest is these moments that chain is not like,

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oh, you know, Muslims love books, look like a jahad loved books.

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That's true. Right. Right. But, you know, you have very different stories told in the 18th century, for example, in the 17th century.

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So it's important to keep you know, that there is a history.

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It's not just all the just the previous the premodern Muslim world, that it's just like one arena that's changing.

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There's a history there. And I think precision is is the the antidote to too lazy generalisations either way.

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Right. I think I mean, this is it's something which I think scholars in our field will have to grapple with for a very good period of time,

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because so much of our field is still, in a sense, trying to correct for, you know,

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issues that existed in 19th century scholarship and early 20th century scholarship.

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A lot of which we're building on. And we benefited a great deal from some of the great scholars of those periods.

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But they also brought a lot of, you know, we could say ideological baggage.

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And I think there is there is an increasing consciousness, however, I mean, in our own time that and sometimes I think it can become as I say,

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it's an overcorrection that the suggestion that ideology is inescapable on some level

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and that there needs to be position in scholarship as well as a consciousness.

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I think of that element. And, you know, I think that the your book does a wonderful job.

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And I think laying down and documenting and giving facts and figures and presenting a compelling history.

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I apologise. You might hear my son in the background. Yes, he's.

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He's a wonderful sort of delight to have around and sometimes sort of drops into these sorts of sessions, but is always welcome.

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And so so I think that, you know, this is something that scholars will continue to sort of struggle with in some respects.

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But I think you've painted us a very persuasive picture of how it could be done in a way that maintains a sort of a fealty to an empiricist dimension,

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as well as a recognition of the way in which indigenous sort of actors viewed their own activities.

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And I think sometimes when ideology or concerns about it can suppress almost the voices of indigenous actors,

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that's something that we all need to be conscious about.

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And it's something that we need to be careful and thoughtful about.

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So I'm just wondering if you've got a little more time, so to speak.

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And I I am tempted to sort of because I jumped to actually the last of the questions and this sort of dialogue section, I.

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I wonder if you would like to talk a little bit about Evan Tamia or if you'd like to.

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Okay, sir. So in a sense, the sort of the last question that I have is about a figure who is in many respects

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quite controversial in our own time and was a bit of a controversialist in his own time,

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to be fair.

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But in Chapter seven, you discuss the mom look polymath, even Tamia as a scholar who emerges, as you put it, as a model of broad erudition.

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Now, you argue that his reputation as an extremist and you are not alone in this, but his reputation as an extremist in recent decades is undeserved.

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But you also point out how he had been neglected by post classical culture.

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And just for clarity, you kind of designate post classical culture as being from the 16th to 19th centuries, roughly.

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And I'm curious to know why the reformists you studied and used the term reformist in a descriptive.

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They were in an effort very self-conscious to reform sort of their societies and the educational cultures.

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Why these reformists singled out in Thamir as a model of broad intellectual sort of erudition,

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given the considerable roster of polymaths found throughout Islamic history?

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What do you think was for then special about him, Thania?

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I think there are there are various elements of his office, his work, of his character, of his.

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The features of of his writing that that were particularly attractive to these reformers.

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The first one is something that I already kind of hinted at a little bit earlier, is that in his writing,

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you don't get the feeling that there is this amorphous tradition in the sense that I think so.

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These modernist reformers, one of their their main challenge was this idea that there is there is this one thing called Islam,

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which is identical to to the kind of a kind of an amorphous tradition which you can either take or you can leave.

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Right. And it's it's. It consists of various various parts.

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And. And so the question of how do you step out of out of it?

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I mean, how do you avoid this this this weight of tradition?

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How do you step out of it, critique parts of it, selecting without becoming, you know, with,

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you know, without having to, for example, just become a convert to West Western rationalism?

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Or what would the Western intellectual fashions of the day and what what what in Timir

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showed is that he was himself somebody who who is difficult to categorise human.

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Right, who do who doesn't? I mean, who is himself doing this kind of work to the orthodoxy of his own day.

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Right. And who does this with his cards on the table in the sense that, you know, when you read the tale as early.

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Right. You know, it is a super intelligent person, but he doesn't tell you who he's read, who has who he has read.

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I mean, hardly ever does he mentioned that or who he. He cites something he cited and he did not actually cite it like he's kind of played.

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I mean, he loves modern day cleaning lady, slightly difficult level macchi, for example, in Lamborghini.

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He takes sections from it, doesn't mention it. So it's because one thing on the other hand.

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I saw a study that somebody did just looking at the much more photograph of him and tell me it.

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So it's just one large work, but it's just not all of the work.

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And he cites 500 works in in in this in this collection explicitly who the person is citing from what?

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Whatever. And so he kind of he paints for you not this amorphous tradition, but, you know, the various forms and how they relate to each other.

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And isn't that the groups that have died out that he's read?

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Because he's I mean, he has read so much that that's part of issues that he has read.

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And and so in a sense, he's or he can also be a guide for you into the tradition.

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So, Zebedee, he basically reproduces in 10 years at Murphy superlatively years because, you know, Temi talks about Martez a lot to see or whatever.

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Like that doesn't rightest anymore. Like, right. You have somebody who can give you a tour of this.

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And so. And you know that that there is there is part, of course, like the kind of historical method, philological method.

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You know, Abraham, you're already criticise us for a couple of the historic historicity off of al-Hassani

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Hussein Mosque in Cairo that documents claimed that they had buried there.

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The head of Alfalfa's then. Right. And Tim, you're just like has it just a normal historical criticism?

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Right. Well, I mean, there is no evidence that this is the head of Hussein.

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And, you know, people say that there is there.

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So it's a it's it's a it's something that you can you can take up in the 20th and the 19th century or early 20th century.

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Tell me what's really we're only starting to be published in nineteen hundred. Right.

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Radically late, but it's it's something that can stand in its own mythological ways and that is kind of actually theologically rigorous in that sense.

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Right. And so that for different groups he can serve as as as a model in different ways.

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It's not just one specific way. Or if you're particularly if you're politically objecting to, let's say, shrine culture,

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which which was a kind of basically universal concern of reformists today, of course.

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We consider that primarily like a concern of hard core kind of jihadis who who want to destroy those those those shrines.

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But it was generally an issue of of kind of modernisers are saying, look, this this is what is this?

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You know, people make these as Quakers. I higher figures that have control over the weather and the harvest.

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Right. My fertility of women and this kind of thing. People were embarrassed about this.

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It shows the sorts of harassment for many people. So so I said, OK.

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We actually have an indigenous scholar who. Who are already in the 14th century criticises this.

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So there is he has something for for a wide range of reformists.

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So this is really interesting about what you mentioned about trying culture as well.

377
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I know I'm not familiar with sort of sexy literature specifically on this.

378
00:41:00,750 --> 00:41:09,150
One thinks of both for work, which is more about mediæval, Kyra. But, you know, it's fascinating that you also used the term embarrassed.

379
00:41:09,150 --> 00:41:12,300
You know, people are starting to become embarrassed about this sort of thing. And, you know,

380
00:41:12,300 --> 00:41:16,500
I'm reminded that even someone like Mohammed Zettl Ghostery Jonathan Brown talks about this

381
00:41:16,500 --> 00:41:21,660
in his discussion on week hadiths that even Mohammed Zettl coteries begins to recognise.

382
00:41:21,660 --> 00:41:23,280
Actually, there are certain types of HEDIS.

383
00:41:23,280 --> 00:41:28,920
We should point out as weak because they are an embarrassment considering sort of modern sensibilities and so on.

384
00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:38,190
But, you know, at the same time, I suspect that, you know, that sort of shrine culture would have, in a sense,

385
00:41:38,190 --> 00:41:41,790
the in the way that you describe this classical culture kind of burgeoned in that

386
00:41:41,790 --> 00:41:47,670
period in a way that might not have existed on such a widespread scale before.

387
00:41:47,670 --> 00:41:55,680
And, you know, it would be wonderful if sort of a scholar were to actually it's a lot to trace through the literature,

388
00:41:55,680 --> 00:42:02,670
but to actually do what we can to sort of illustrate that that was, in fact, the case.

389
00:42:02,670 --> 00:42:08,550
But it does seem to be suggested, by the way, in which you say terrorism becomes quite important.

390
00:42:08,550 --> 00:42:15,000
I think in the way that you portrayed this, and it does seem you present a very compelling narrative.

391
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:20,850
That's what I can say. And we'll be definitely sort of grappling with this for very long to come.

392
00:42:20,850 --> 00:42:27,720
And, you know, I can only thank you for sort of working on this book.

393
00:42:27,720 --> 00:42:35,640
And as we come to a close, I just want to sort of let everyone know that I've been speaking to the author, Ahmed H.M.S.,

394
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about his recent book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.